Harold Larnder Prize

Omond Solandt Award

Award of Merit

Service Awards

Practice Prize Competition

Harold Larnder Prize

Description

The Harold Larnder Prize is awarded annually to an individual who has achieved international distinction in operational research. The prize winner delivers the Harold Larnder Memorial Lecture, on a topic of general interest to operational researchers, at the National Conference of the Canadian Operational Research Society.

Harold Larnder was a well-known Canadian in wartime OR. He played a major part in the development of an effective, radar-based, air defence system during the Battle of Britain. He returned to Canada in 1951 to join the Canadian Defence Research Board and was President of CORS in 1966-67.

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Edward G. Coffman, Professor Emeritus
Columbia University

Professor Ed Coffman began his career as a systems programmer at the System Development Corporation (SDC) in the late 50s. He wrote the scheduling/dispatching kernel of the SDC/ARPA time-sharing system, which joined the MIT time-sharing system in 1963 in becoming the first fully operational time sharing systems. His modeling and analysis of the SDC system, which also established the beginnings of computer networks, was the springboard for his career in OR. His PhD at UCLA in 1966 was followed by a series of positions at Princeton University, The Pennsylvania State University, Columbia University, and the University of California at Santa Barbara. In 1979, he joined the Math Center at Bell Labs where he stayed until his retirement in 1999. After a one-year stint at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, he returned to Columbia University with appointments in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Industrial Engineering and Operations Research. He retired from teaching in 2008 and is now a Professor Emeritus still fully engaged in research and in professional activities.

Coffman's research has followed several parallel paths drawing on the tools of combinatorial optimization along with those of applied probability and stochastic processes. The OR disciplines include scheduling, bin-packing, and dynamic resource allocation, along with problems in polling, reservation, and moving-server systems. His contributions have been divided between mathematical foundations and the design and analysis of approximation algorithms for NP-hard problems. Applications have been very broad in scope. Most recently, his research has been directed toward Internet congestion, peer-to-peer networks, self-assembly processes of molecular computing, local-rule algorithms in sensor networks, and dynamic spectrum pooling in wireless communications. His professional contributions have included several editorships, conference organizations, and participation on committees of the National Research Council charged with setting research agendas; in the late 60s and early 70s he co-founded the Symposium on Operating System Principles, and two special interest groups on computer and network performance evaluation under the sponsorship of ACM and IFIPS.

Ed Coffman (l) accepting the Larnder Award from Wieslaw Kubiak.

Previous Recipients

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2010

John D.C. Little

2009

Steve Gallivan

2008

Thomas L. Magnanti

2007

Edward A. Silver

2006

Ralph E. Gomory

2005

Sven Axsater

2004

Richard C. Larson

2003

Hau L. Lee

2002

Arthur Geoffrion

2001

Ward Whitt

2000

Andres Weintraub

1999

Harvey J. Greenberg

1998

Paolo Toth

1997

George B. Dantzig

1996

Jan Karel Lenstra

1995

Allan Manne

1994

Ailsa Land

1993

William Pierskalla

1992

Brian Haley

1991

Jacques Lesourne

1990

Hugh Miser

1989

Abraham Charnes

1988

Harvey Wagner

1987

Patrick Rivett

1986

Eugene Woolsey